Friday, 10:00-18:15
Sala Jacopo da Bertinoro
Session: Humour and Spoken Discourse (Jodi Nelms)
CONVERSATIONAL MOCKING AND THE PROCESSING OF NEW GENDER IDENTITIES
Helga Kotthoff, German Department, Freiburg University of Education,
Freiburg, Germany
My paper will concern conversational joking and ironic sequences which were recorded during shared evening meals among good acquaintances in Germany and Austria (mixed sex, all academics) (Kotthoff 1998) who identify in a broad sense with egalitarian gender politics. The background is an approach which could be labeled "identities in interaction." I would like to show how new gender identities are implicitly negotiated and confirmed in the mocking humor of this social milieu. Put in ethnomethodological terms I am looking at how "doing being progessive" is acted out conversationally. The comical narratives I will take a close look at communicate agreement not only about the contents of what is said and laughed about, but also about particular performance strategies and evocations of "old-fashioned people." This will be discussed on the basis of various transcripts from dinners among friends in which the participants manage distinction from those who still adhere to traditional standards of male and female roles. They often relate narratives from scenes in which they are confronted with conservative people whom the group knows well. In grotesque citations the progressive academics use South German dialects to typify the "traditionalists," citing their own speech in Standard German. Knowledge of various social milieus forms implicit background assumptions which the group alludes to in a playful way. To explain allusion, the researcher must have access to the social knowledge of the group whose humor s/he studies. Sociological humor theorists have pointed out that those who laugh together build an in-group which unites in joint perception of some incongruity, some playful breaking of contextual assumptions (Mulkay 1988). We witness in the data that on the one side humor unites the group and creates solidarity among them, on the other side it creates distance, above all to the objects of laughter, here those who stick to traditional sex roles. Joking permits implicit moralization; it suits the humorist for implicitly assuring herself or himself that others share her/his frame of mind, perspective and attitude. This implicit adjustment of moral norms in humorous communication suits members of a society who are establishing among themselves new behavioral standards, i.e. in regard to gender. In Western societies social milieus today differ in regard to gendered identities. In the paper I will try to connect the analysis of conversational joking to sociological mileu theory (Bourdieu 1979) and to theories of identity as an achievement (Antaki/Widdicombe 1998).